The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Communications systems need a transmission medium for the signals, which transmission medium is very often made up of multiple conductors. The presence of these multiple conductors can be exploited in order to enhance various features of the communications system, such as the transmission capacity or immunity to noise, among others. One of the ways of exploiting a multi-conductor medium is to use orthogonal modes, for which it is necessary to inject signals in that medium in the right way; this can be done inductively or in voltage.
The device of the invention is designed for being able to apply the method specified in Spanish Application No. 200702256 relating to a “Method for increasing the performance of a communications system on a medium made up of multiple conductors”, injecting the signals in the multi-conductor medium inductively. As occurred in this patent, the description of the inventive device uses various conventional concepts which are commented on below. “Mode” is understood to be the injection of voltage or current on a selective combination of conductors, reference plane or both. Likewise, “orthogonal multi-injection” is defined as being an injection of multiple modes orthogonal to each other. The injection modes are divided into a common mode, differential modes, and pseudo-differential modes. The common mode is that which causes circulation of currents via the reference plane. The differential modes consist of injection by a conductor and collection of the return via the other, while the pseudo-differential modes consist of injection of voltage or current between one or more conductors and return via one or more conductors different from those used for the injection, the number of conductors used in this case being greater than two.
There exists in the state of the art some patents with methods intended to increase the performance of a communications system when the medium is a multi-conductor which leave unsolved the problem of carrying out the injection in that medium. The inventive device solves this shortcoming and focuses on the specific way of carrying out inductive injection on that medium in order to achieve orthogonality among the injections; it therefore solves the stated problem and as a consequence it is not anticipated by the documents existing in the state of the art.
Moreover, the state of the art also contains patents on inductive couplers, but which do not anticipate the present invention. One of these patents is document WO-03/063381-A1 known as “Coupling device”, which describes an inductive method of coupling for zones where it is necessary to inject on different branches of the electrical network and where those injections are carried out differentially on two conductors of each branch. Given that, with the method described, it is not possible to carry out orthogonal multi-injection on multiple conductors with injections in common, differential and pseudo-differential mode, said patent being referred to does not anticipate the inventive device.